The deny-by-default permission model

Windows has long been a hacker's target of choice due to its popularity. There's another reason too. Up until Vista, Windows systems have been far easier to hack due to the allow-by-default permission model where a standard user – including an interloping hacker using your rights – needs no administrative privileges to execute a script.

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The open source advantage

Like WordPress or server-side apps such as Apache, MySQL or PHP, Linux is open source software as opposed to closed source, so what the bejeebers is that?

Take Windows. This is closed, proprietary software, meaning that only a relatively tiny team of talents can develop it, for instance smoking out bugs before pushing out patches.

Compare that to most Linux systems. Being open, they can be tweaked and tested by anyone working in a strict hierarchy of users and geeks-on-high to ensure quality control.

OS X, meanwhile, has a proprietary user interface and applications, but sits on an open source kernel, the system core which, in this case, is forked from BSD.

So this is a numbers game, do the math! Aside from being free, open source software is more thoroughly tested and, finding a bug, the patch rollout is often dramatically faster.

Operating system security summary

At the risk of further fanning the flame wars, of the more user-friendly systems, the open model of Linux gives it the security edge. That said, Macs aren't far behind and Windows 7 and 8 are worthy of praise. This is very much my opinion, I hasten to add. The lack of a level playing field, where for instance hackers still mostly target Windows systems which also dominates market share, makes a fully justifiable comparison impossible to achieve.

XP, on the other hand, requires great user discipline to ensure security. That's not to say it can't be used. It can. It would, however, be dim to encourage its use on a security site. 😛

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